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  #1  
Old Feb 17, 2009, 03:26 PM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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Lightbulb Let's Tag - A utility to assist with tagging VGM

Hi guys,

You might be interested in a handy utility I just released. It's called Let's Tag and it helps you tag VGM albums by using album data from VGMdb.net. I decided to make this utility because I have a whole mess of untagged or mistagged mp3s, and I'm too lazy to do all the tagging by hand.

The utility is a Windows application (though it runs under Mono, too) that downloads album data from VGMdb and exports it to a text file in a format that can be easily imported into Mp3tag. It's kind of a roundabout way of doing things, I know, but it's still better than doing it by hand.

You can find the application and other info on GitHub:
https://github.com/tomvoros/lets-tag

The current version is 0.2.2 which is compatible with vgmdb.net as of July 23, 2017. I'm no longer supporting Let's Tag, however you're welcome to fork it on GitHub. I'll consider all pull requests!

Hope you guys like it!



Also check out Zorbfish's cddb/freedb emulation which might be an even better way of getting your tag data into Mp3tag (and other tagging apps).

Last edited by PhantomSnake; Jul 23, 2017 at 11:09 AM.
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  #2  
Old Feb 17, 2009, 04:56 PM
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This is an amazing idea and this is the feature i have been waiting for.

I could not try it fully atm since i don't have .net 3.5 (seems like i get an error when i want to export with .net 3.0) but i'll probably get it just for that tool


* I was wondering about a tool like this to create .txt files or .nfo files with all the album data (title, catalog... ), just as your tool is doing now!
But if you could add the "notes field", that would be awesome.
And an option to export these infos as .txt or .nfo would be sweet.

(note that i do not want to get rid of .nfo files that contains credits but everyone got tons of albums without this kind of files)


* What about albums that got multiple tracklists?
Seems like you can't choose which one you want (it pick the default one for the moment -probably the best one to pick up- but hey that's just a suggestion!)

I probably could name some more feature but that could be "too much" for such a tinny tool, and if fits only the tagging job, i will be happy.

Of course it can't tag the tags correctly with composers breakdown, but which tool can do that..

Great Job.
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  #3  
Old Feb 17, 2009, 05:18 PM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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Hi Myrkul. Glad you like it. Hope you get it working with .NET 3.5!

There are lots of new features I'd like to add over time. That's why this is version 0.1. It's just the basic functionality for now. Nothing fancy, but still useful, I hope! The features you mentioned would be great!

Some features I'm considering:
  • Ability to select language -- both for album details and for the tracklist
  • Export nicely formatted album summary to .nfo or .txt
  • Export playlist to .m3u (though you can do that with Mp3tag already)
  • Basic editing functionality to add/edit/delete album details
  • Get the release year from the VGMdb "Release Date" field
  • Automatically download album art
  • Maybe even built-in tagging support so you don't need to use Mp3tag

Let me know if you have any other ideas.
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  #4  
Old Feb 18, 2009, 06:25 AM
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This is pretty neat. I've never used Mp3Tag, but I've been looking for another tagger so I'm going to have to try it out.

Someday we'll have track-by-track credits built into the site, so support for that might be something that could be added to your tagger in the future.
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  #5  
Old Feb 18, 2009, 10:13 AM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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Cool. Looking forward to that track-by-track credits feature!

Is there, by any chance, any public API to get album details in a convenient data format? (JSON or XML, maybe?) My current method of getting the album details is very fragile... I use a bunch of regular expressions.

I do the same thing for search results (parse the results page with regexes), but I did find your nice AJAX data provider for that (ajax-autocomplete.php), so I'll switch over to that at some point.


Edit: Nevermind, it seems Gigablah is planning just such an API.

Last edited by PhantomSnake; Feb 18, 2009 at 10:19 AM.
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  #6  
Old Feb 20, 2009, 01:48 PM
LiquidAcid LiquidAcid is offline
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I'd need something like that for linux. Or at least some script to get the tracklist into foobar2000 (using this through wine for tagging work) or eyeD3. Already have some simple script that converts the copy&paste results of the tracklist into a format that is usuable by fb2k through the masstagging engine (input data line by line).

Of course that's also a lot of work:
Manually copy&paste the tracklist from VGMdb, then run the script on the data, after that copy the data over to fb2k (also manually).

Perhaps it's easier to let something like curl fetch the album page, then parse the HTML code itself and use eyeD3 to do the tagging (I have no idea if you can script fb2k to that extend that you can supply tagging info through the commandline). However eyeD3 has the nasty behaviour to write some timestamp data to the ID3v2, something I do not want.
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  #7  
Old Feb 20, 2009, 05:25 PM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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Have you tried my app in Wine?

I could also try compiling it with Mono...

Edit: Just tried it in Linux. The Windows binary works as-is with Mono! Of course, you still need something like Mp3tag to apply the tags.

Last edited by PhantomSnake; Feb 20, 2009 at 10:31 PM.
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  #8  
Old Feb 21, 2009, 02:46 AM
LiquidAcid LiquidAcid is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PhantomSnake View Post
Have you tried my app in Wine?

I could also try compiling it with Mono...

Edit: Just tried it in Linux. The Windows binary works as-is with Mono! Of course, you still need something like Mp3tag to apply the tags.
Yeah, the thing is that I'm not really into installing a huge toolkit because of one single application.
I also think .NET is a bit of an overkill

On second thought I don't think I want another GUI-based application to do the work. I figure that your tool isn't commandline-only based, right?
The reason for that is: the system where the tagging would be done is a headless one, only with ssh access. There are no X libs or whatever installed.
Currently I use sshfs to mount the music directory into my regular laptop filesystem (so I can use fb2k). Looking for some cleaner solution. And using more applications through wine isn't exactly a clean solution *g*

Well, I keep on searching.
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  #9  
Old Feb 21, 2009, 10:20 AM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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I was thinking of adding command line functionality anyway, but you're right about .NET... It's a beast.

I'll see what I can do about a proper port.
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  #10  
Old Feb 22, 2009, 10:43 AM
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Another option here for the *n*x users is that there's an excellent tagging tool called ex-falso. If you can give a little help with how you poll vgmdb, ex-falso could be extended with a plugin to do the same thing.
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  #11  
Old Feb 23, 2009, 06:52 PM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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I figure I might as well release the full source code for Let's Tag, right?

Here you go:
Let's Tag 0.1 Source
Edit: The latest source can be found here.

I tried to clean up the regexes a bit. I also slapped on a GPL license just for the heck of it.

For those who just want the regexes, here they are, straight from the code:

Code:
        readonly static Regex albumNameRegex = new Regex(
            @"<span\s+class\s*=\s*" + "[\\\'\\\"]albumtitle[\\\'\\\"]" + @"\s+lang\s*=\s*" + "[\\\'\\\"]en[\\\'\\\"]" + @".*?>(.*?)</span>",
            RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

        readonly static Regex detailRegex = new Regex(
            @"<tr>.*?<td.*?>.*?<span\s+class\s*=\s*" + "[\\\'\\\"]label[\\\'\\\"]" + @".*?>\s*<b>(.*?)</b>\s*</span>.*?</td>" +
            @".*?<td.*?>(.*?)</td>.*?</tr>",
            RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

        readonly static Regex detailCatalogNumberRegex = new Regex(
            @"<span\s+id\s*\=\s*" + "[\\\'\\\"]childbrowse[\\\'\\\"]" + @".*?" +
            @"<a\s+.*?>(.*?)</a>",
            RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

        readonly static Regex detailMultilingualValueRegex = new Regex(
            @"<span\s+.*?lang\s*\=\s*" + "[\\\'\\\"](.*?)[\\\'\\\"]" + @".*?>(.*?)</span>",
            RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

        readonly static Regex detailValueCleanupRegex = new Regex(
            @"<.*?>",
            RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

        readonly static Regex discRegex = new Regex(
            @"<b>\s*Disc\s+(\d+)\s*</b>.*?<table.*?>(.*?)</table>",
            RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

        readonly static Regex trackRegex = new Regex(
            @"<span\s+class\s*=\s*" + "[\\\'\\\"]label[\\\'\\\"]" + @"\s*>(.*?)</span>" + // Track number
            @".*?<td.*?>(.*?)</td>", // Track name
            RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
It's best to look at the code to figure out how these regexes are used. Also, I'm no regex wizard, so I apologize if any of it is confusing.

I'm focusing on a different project right now. I'll probably get back to this in a little while. I hope you guys can make some use of the source in the meantime!

Last edited by PhantomSnake; May 11, 2009 at 07:19 PM.
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  #12  
Old Mar 6, 2009, 02:43 PM
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Thanks PhantomSnake! I will be using this application as I have a fair amount of VGM that needs some tagging and I'm just too lazy to do it all myself.
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  #13  
Old Mar 6, 2009, 03:31 PM
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I am definitely using this program (in association) with MP3tag for over 2 weeks now. If you configure well MP3tag, it works like a charm. (ie: configure it well to change automatically these non-acceptable characters (:, /, ? ...) that you often find in vgmdb tracklists and everything is fine.
It tags well multiple cds (of the same album of course) from anywhere on your hard drive in a second.
I found a way to tag & rename all my files in a few clicks.
At start i was not having so much confidence in the tool (i did some back-ups..etc..) but i really tested it in all kind of situation, and til you have your tracks in the "right" order, there's no problem.

Only thing to do after that is a quick check (once again you must trust at 200% the tracklists on vgmdb and these are not 100% accurate (some spelling errors here and there).
And finaly you must re-tag it correctly if you want to add composition/artists breakdown (but that goes fast with MP3tag).


my advices if you are going to use this tool:
- you must be very vigilant to have your tracks in the right order, the most commun problem is coming from "data tracks", depending on how you renamed your files, to count it or not.

- check the result after you tagged them, you still can undo changes on MP3tag.

- you can configure "let's tag" to choose the only informations you want.
(ie: it dosn't took me too long to tag & rename all those beatmania albums, i already had the artists tagged correctly, but wanted the other information)

Really, a great tool.
The only downside is that you need .net 3.5

Last edited by Myrkul; Mar 6, 2009 at 03:39 PM.
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  #14  
Old Apr 19, 2009, 04:32 PM
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I am bumping this thread to say that "Let's Tag" is not working anymore..

Surely caused by some changes from the website.
If you still hang around PhantomSnake, maybe you could check what's going on?
And if you got the time, to release a fix to make it work again.

Thanks.

EDIT: the "search" is not working anymore but you still can use the fonction "album" (you need to copy/paste the exact url of the album).
Of course the search method is better, but at least it's still working.. (i wouldn't mind for a fix though)

Last edited by Myrkul; Apr 19, 2009 at 04:40 PM.
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  #15  
Old Apr 19, 2009, 05:10 PM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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Yep... Something on the search results page must have changed. I'll take a look.
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  #16  
Old Apr 19, 2009, 05:54 PM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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All right, it's fixed! The new version is 0.1.1.

The change was very minor. The CSS class on the <span> element containing the catalog number was changed from "time" to "catalog". Seems like a good change.

By the way, Myrkul, thanks for the promotional speech above!

I've been working on version 0.2 and I think it will be ready soon. The new version will add a command line interface, more flexible exporting options, and the ability to save custom export presets.
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  #17  
Old Apr 19, 2009, 07:15 PM
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Thanks for the very fast fix, really.

And no problem for the comments, i still use your tool, i tagged countless of albums with it (in combination with MP3tag), it's very fast and effective.

There's still a bit of work to replace that "artist" ID but it's not a big matter as you can often find breakdowns on the notes of the album.
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  #18  
Old May 9, 2009, 02:21 PM
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Would there be any way to add "front cover art" functionality into this tool at all?

A user of Let's Tag mentioned on another vgm board that they like this tool for tagging their collection, but they have to manually grab the front cover pics from vgmdb for their iPod display screen.

Just thought I'd toss this out there just in case it'd be possible to implement such a feature into Let's Tag.
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  #19  
Old May 10, 2009, 07:49 PM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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I'm adding cover art in version 0.2. You'll be able to copy the cover art to the clipboard (for pasting into Mp3tag) or save it to a file.

I'll be releasing the new version very soon.
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  #20  
Old May 10, 2009, 08:52 PM
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PhantomSnake: Just a heads-up, you can now perform searches using the following URL format:

http://vgmdb.net/search?q=search+term

I'll be working on returning XML data soon.
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  #21  
Old May 11, 2009, 02:35 PM
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Superb initiative, but requires .NET crap, why o why ;_;
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  #22  
Old May 11, 2009, 03:02 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PhantomSnake View Post
I'm adding cover art in version 0.2. You'll be able to copy the cover art to the clipboard (for pasting into Mp3tag) or save it to a file.

I'll be releasing the new version very soon.
Very nice. Since I'm the "user on another vgm board" I'm definitely looking forward to trying this out. Keep up the good work PhantomSnake!

-Mike
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  #23  
Old May 11, 2009, 05:38 PM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Gigablah View Post
PhantomSnake: Just a heads-up, you can now perform searches using the following URL format:

http://vgmdb.net/search?q=search+term

I'll be working on returning XML data soon.
Awesome! No more POSTing! I think I still owe you a PM response about the XML data format, though if you've already come up with something I'm sure it will be fine.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Alcahest View Post
Superb initiative, but requires .NET crap, why o why ;_;
You know, there was a period of time when I coded only in GNU C++, for portability... It's only very recently that I started playing with C# and .NET. I, too, used to be a .NET hater, and I still am to some degree, but I have to say... it's an excellent development platform. (Not so excellent for the end users though, I know.)
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  #24  
Old May 11, 2009, 07:15 PM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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Let's Tag 0.2 is up!

What's new?
  • Cover art is downloaded and displayed. It can be copied to the clipboard (for pasting into Mp3tag) or saved to a file.
  • Added a command line app, letstagc.exe, for those who want to use Let's Tag in scripts or batch files. (Functionality is fairly limited at the moment.)
  • Export presets can be saved. They are saved as XML files in Let's Tag's Presets folder.
  • Editing the export preset XML files by hand allows you to make more advanced presets. For example, it is possible to put multiple album fields into a single MP3 tag field.
  • Code was refactored quite a bit, though it still needs some work.

Instructions for the command line app:

Code:
Usage: letstagc [OPTION] [FILE]
Download album data from vgmdb.net and output formatted data to FILE.

Options:
  -a, --album=NUMBER            album NUMBER of album to download
  -p, --preset=NAME             use preset NAME to format output

When FILE is not specified, write to standard output.
The album option is required. The preset option is optional (if preset is not specified, the "Default" preset will be used). I probably should've put this info in the actual app!

Last edited by PhantomSnake; May 11, 2009 at 07:27 PM.
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  #25  
Old May 12, 2009, 03:59 PM
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Could I just say that this site is becoming a developer's dream? Maybe I'm just biased, but the API features could end up becoming more popular than the site itself.

You might actually end up making too much of a good thing. Look at Twitter - most of the messages there are sent using cell phones, other websites and desktop applications. Their API is so capable that some software uses Twitter to communicate without the user even knowing that it's there
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  #26  
Old May 17, 2009, 05:18 PM
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I'm digging 0.2 so far, just got to try it out tonight for the first time. May I suggest a couple features though? The ability to save the album art as JPG rather than (or in addition to) the PNG format. And better yet, rather than having to right click the artwork and save as, how about the ability to drag and drop it into a folder and have Let's Tag automatically name it front.jpg or folder.jpg? That would be incredible and would save me loads of time trying to add album art to all my albums.

Other than that, I tagged a few new rips earlier and it was waaay easier using Let's Tag than having to copy/paste/edit the tracklist manually from the actual site. Keep it up!

-Mike
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Old May 18, 2009, 10:41 AM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by the_miker View Post
I'm digging 0.2 so far, just got to try it out tonight for the first time. May I suggest a couple features though? The ability to save the album art as JPG rather than (or in addition to) the PNG format. And better yet, rather than having to right click the artwork and save as, how about the ability to drag and drop it into a folder and have Let's Tag automatically name it front.jpg or folder.jpg? That would be incredible and would save me loads of time trying to add album art to all my albums.

Other than that, I tagged a few new rips earlier and it was waaay easier using Let's Tag than having to copy/paste/edit the tracklist manually from the actual site. Keep it up!

-Mike
I wanted to implement drag and drop but couldn't find any documentation on the feature. There is lots of documentation and sample code showing how to drag and drop from Explorer to a .NET app, but virtually none showing how to drag and drop from a .NET app to Explorer... I did just find something that looks promising though... I'll check it out soon.

I can add saving as JPG images as well. That's easy enough.
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  #28  
Old May 18, 2009, 04:50 PM
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I am asking my request again..

Could it be possible to implement a feature that export a little (*.txt or *.nfo) file with all informations you could find on the album page:
title, cat #, date, price.. etc .. (the upper field) & the note field ?

Asking for the product & platform.. as well the tracklist might be too much ..?

But a file export like this would make life easier to anyone that want to add this kind of files to their albums.

Thanks for the version 0.2, and i hope you'll release new versions in the future
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Old May 23, 2009, 05:20 PM
PhantomSnake PhantomSnake is offline
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I've added drag and drop and additional image save formats in version 0.2.1. Dragging and dropping the album cover to an Explorer window will save the album cover as folder.jpg.

Myrkul, I haven't forgotten your request. It's a bit more work than drag and drop but I will definitely add your request as well.

I'm going to be busy for a little while so I don't think there will be any new versions for the next few weeks.
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  #30  
Old May 25, 2009, 04:41 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PhantomSnake View Post
I've added drag and drop and additional image save formats in version 0.2.1. Dragging and dropping the album cover to an Explorer window will save the album cover as folder.jpg.
You are the man. It works exactly as advertised. This is going to save me so much time. Thank you!

-Mike
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